Write the Girl is a partnership between schools and theatre professionals to support playwrights in creating the powerful, meaningful stories young women deserve. Schools select a play from our play-pack, commission a playwright, and collaborate on a creative journey from pen to stage. The result? New plays that feature large casts, challenge, and engage young women - often marginalised by a male-dominated canon - on the main stage.
Why We Do It
There’s a shortage of plays with strong roles for young women, where they drive the action, not just “watch and weep”. Write the Girl fills this gap, providing opportunities for new works that give female students the chance to shine. Our aim is to bring these plays to life in schools and eventually showcase them in professional theatres. We also hope to make these plays available for GCSE and A Level performances
Write the Girl
What’s Involved
Performances from pen to stage
The project is designed to provide a wonderful experience for the writers, performers and schools which put on the productions and ultimately the audience.
Writers are given the opportunity of their developing ideas, and through workshops to develop their ideas and be given constructive feedback on their proposals and help with commissioning their play to be written with full production in a school setting. The aim is to have these plays out on full public view in professional theatre settings and/or published for use in GCSE and A level performances.
Students are given the opportunity to perform in, direct and produce plays which feature narratives where the female characters are front and centre in their debut on the stage. These plays also give the opportunity for collaboration with other schools for example, our play Lady Malcolm’s Ball which was a joint production with our neighbour school, Hampton and Team was performed by a cast of students from both LEH School and our local partner, Hampton High
…The Girl Writes
This initiative encourages students to write their own plays with female-centric stories, which may be commissioned as Write the Girl productions. Students from participating schools get involved in the creative process, offering an avenue for constructive feedback and cross-school productions with Write the Girl playwrights offering mentorship. In June 2021, LEH Lower 6 playwrights, Diya Sengupta and Amy Brian presented their play ‘Of Silent Words’ which went on to be one of 30 plays shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Playwriting.
Workshops and events
LEH regularly hosts afternoon workshops to inspire further collaboration between schools and playwrights as part of the Write the Girl scheme. Heads of Drama from state and independent schools nationwide come together with playwrights for a series of bespoke workshops and Q&A sessions to set out how this ground-breaking initiative can benefit schools. In the latest workshop, run with the help
of Drama students from both LEH School and St Albans High School we discussed ideas and worked on bringing the playwrights’ proposals and short scripts to life with voice and movement.
The Future
We will continue producing Write the Girl plays as our School Play each year and encouraging other schools to do the same. With ...the girl writes we hope to be creating the next generation of great writers who will produce work which will offer more opportunities to those who have typically been underrepresented in the theatre world. We are also working on a ...the girl directs programme in response to a keen interest from our students, allowing them to work with more theatre professionals in this capacity. In that way, not only will Write the Girl have succeeded in producing more dynamic work for our young women, but it will have also empowered them to write and direct their own.
WRITE THE GIRL PLAY PACK
Untaming
By Kayla Feldman
Our most recent Write the Girl production, performed in February 2024. In Untaming Shakespeare’s female characters re-tell their histories from their perspectives. As they reclaim their stolen/lost/broken voices, a group of 21st century students studying The Taming of the Shrew protest about the injustice and abuse suffered not only by Katherine in this play, but by women in all Shakespeare’s plays studied so readily across the world today.
Throughout the play the audience traverses many worlds; the old and the new; fiction and reality; questioning our understanding of what exactly should be taught in the modern classroom. The play has been shortlisted for the National Theatre Awards, 2025.
Team
By Beattie Green
A play about women’s football away from the zoo: no lionesses, no caged animals, no hungry punters. This is the wild grassroots, all played out in a muddy field somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Without flashing lights, without stadiums, without online forums dissecting the relative weaknesses of ‘the women’s game’, as if it were a different game, a different ballpark.
“What excellent young actors! They brought such life and colour to the characters which was more than I ever could have hoped for. Thank you for doing such a great job of directing and bringing the play to life so sensitively and ambitiously.” Beattie Green, Team Playwright
Lady Malcolm’s Ball
by Freddie Machin
Lady Malcom’s Ball finally hit the stage in May 2023 after the pandemic interrupted our original plans. The cast was a mix of LEH and Hampton High students. The play is based on the true story of Lady Malcolm and is a bold and hilarious exploration of rebellion, rebelling against class, gender, family and societal expectations. “In a bid to become the most charitable woman in society,” Freddie explains, “Lady Malcolm throws a ball for all the servants in London. It becomes so popular that in the early 1930s it moves to the Royal Albert Hall, attracting celebrity guests and huge media attention. But it also attracts subversion and transgression. Lady Malcolm doesn’t invite cross dressers, and drag queens, but they come and leave a social revolution in their wake.”
Betsey
By Lucy Foster
The production of Betsey premiered in December 2021. Taking inspiration from the ever popular musical, Hamilton, it concentrates on the briefly mentioned, Elizabeth Schuyler ‘Betsey’, Hamilton’s wife. She lived for another 50 years after Hamilton’s death and did a number of incredible things including settled her husband’s debts, co-founded New York’s first private orphanage, and even fundraised to build the Washington Monument. In this play Betsey is elevated from a simple footnote in a man’s story to the forefront of this production and tell her story focusing on visuals, using large ensembles to create a world of widowhood that Eliza is suddenly thrown into the middle of, how she fought to create a life for herself, and won.
“The unique and original storyline provided the opportunity for all actors to contribute to the direction of scenes as well as collaborate on the ensemble concepts which played a large part towards the non-naturalistic style of the performance.” Yasmin Al-Obadi, Drama Scholar
Wellington 24
By Rachel Harper
Our first Write the Girl play, Wellington 24, was written and performed in 2020. At a time full of so much political uncertainty and unrest, this play revisits an era that was caught in the full effects of war - shining a light on the stories to go unseen. World War Two was a huge catalyst for women in the workplace, and these women, whether fighting for their country or fighting for their own right to work or simply looking for something to do - all played their part. This play raises the question of contributing to a war and the consequences of individual choices.
Of Silent Words
By Diya Sengupta and Amy Brian, LEH Alumae
Our first ‘…The Girl Writes’ commission, ‘Of Silent Words’ debuted at LEH in June 2021. It went on to be shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting.
Playwrights
Kayla Feldman is a freelance director and writer for the page, stage, and screen. She is a Co-Founder of Snapper Theatre and Sovereign Writers Group and was part of the inaugural cohort for the NO BORDERS Artists Project at the Royal Court Theatre. Her play Watchdog was a longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting and Theatre503’s International Playwriting Prize in 2023; shortlisted for the RSC’s 37 Plays Project; was a top-ten finalist for Titchfield Festival Theatre’s New Playwriting Award; and received an honourable mention from the Jewish Plays Project Prize in 2022.
Lucy Foster is a writer and director, her first play, LOBSTER, opened at Theatre503 in 2018. In 2020 Lucy became a finalist for Flickers of the Future, a filmmaking competition run by Global Action Plan. Her play HONEY was a finalist for Soho Theatre’s Verity Bargate Award (2020). In 2021 Lucy was selected for Behind Closed Doors by Lemon Tree Theatre, an online scratch night showcasing the work of writers of underrepresented genders, who are exploring themes of sex, bodies and intimacy in their work.
Beattie Green is a young playwright whose work has been performed at the National Theatre (after winning the New Views competition at age 17) and the Corpus Playroom in
Cambridge, as well as read at the Royal Court Upstairs, Theatre Royal Stratford East and The Hope Theatre. Interested in miscommunication and how language both makes and destroys us, Beattie’s work focuses especially on telling stories about women and queer people without tokenism.
Rachel Harper is a writer and actor. Her debut full-length play Rattled ran at the Old Red Lion, London, in 2019 earning her an OFFIE nomination. Since then, she has gone on to write original comedy for BBC Wales, has several comedy dramas commissioned to pilot with various independents, and has written many episodes of the BBC medical drama Casualty
Freddie Machin is a playwright and screenwriter and describes himself as writing “drama with a social conscience and sense of humour, which often revolves around taut, disrupted family dynamics.” His first stageplay, Chicken, was produced at Southwark Playhouse in 2011 and was subsequently adapted into feature film which got its UK cinema release in May 2016. He is a Lecturer in Screenwriting at Keele University and has taught, directed and written for several FDS accredited drama schools including LAMDA, Central School of Speech and Drama, Manchester School of Theatre, Drama Studio London, and Italia Conti.
